Partition means different things to different people. For some, it is grief of separation, exile and loss. For others, a retrospective legitimisation of their prejudices. And for many, it is a terrible event that took place a very long time ago and has minimal bearing on the present. A collective memory of Partition seems to have settled in our minds as a layered narrative made of short stories, history textbook references, cinema and, of course, online discourse. This collective memory, as is usually the case, has become the ‘common sense’ understanding of the partition. The prevalent understanding goes something like this: Partition was a wrong done to the country, its costs were borne primarily by one community and the lesson it teaches is one of communal suspicion rather than shared loss. This common sense, like all common sense, is slow and passive and over time assuming a strong element of tradition. One could either take it or leave it, but it is mostly beyond questioning. This is not to say there is nothing beyond common sense. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, for instance, remains one of the most significant attempts to recover what official histories and archives disregarded. Working with civil society groups responding to the violence against Sikhs in 1984, Butalia kept hearing people compare the targeted violence to that of partition. That connection sent her, over the next decade, looking for the people who had lived through this traumatic event and yet had never really been asked to recount it. What she found were complicated experiences and memories, not unlike Keenu and Jiya in Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga (MVA) and the utter tragedy of the Grewal family. The story follows a man in his nineties, Keenu/Ishar Singh Grewal (played by Naseeruddin Shah), whose memory keeps pulling him back to a village near Sargodha, now in Pakistan, and to his beloved Jiya/Afsana (played by Sharvari Wagh), whom he had to leave behind when the country was arbitrarily and violently divided in two. His grandson Nirvair (played by Diljit Dosanjh) slowly pieces the fable together from the older man’s rambling, riddled with oblique metaphors. The older Keenu’s last painful breaths, it seems, hinge on whether Afsana will grant him leave one last time.Screengrab from the trailer of Main Vaapas Aaunga, Photo: YouTube/Applause Entertainment, Tips Official.The film moves back and forth between 1947 and the present, ending with footage of refugees from contemporary conflicts around the world. One of the first things it brought to mind was Vazira Zamindar’s book The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, in which she argues that the partition did not conclude in 1947. According to Zamindar, it should be understood as a long, administrative and in some ways still unfinished process of sorting people into nations – a form of violence, distinct from but continuous with the killings of that year.The two routesAt the film’s emotional core is a choice that every generation makes about how to handle inherited pain. There are two routes. The first is that of grievance and hatred, fixated on finding someone to blame and then persecuting them. This route is fuelled by political speeches, school curricula, propaganda films and the WhatsApp ‘academy,’ which, for many families, is the primary space where history is simplified, weaponised and transmitted. It is, as we all know, a very efficient route. Screengrab from the trailer of Main Vaapas Aaunga, Photo: YouTube/Applause Entertainment, Tips Official.The other route goes through love. It requires processing the violence while holding tenderness at the same time. It requires questioning and resisting the version of the past that resolves cleanly into villains and victims. Above all, it needs acknowledging that people on both sides were ordinary citizens who wanted to live ordinary lives but were swept up in something none of them fully comprehended or chose. It sounds naive and idealistic and it perhaps is. It is also the more demanding route.Taking the second route does not mean forgetting or forgiving what transpired. Justice for historical wrongs is a legitimate demand. But justice and revenge are not the same thing. Sometimes what justice demands is much simpler yet harder than punishment: the acknowledgement of what happened. Main Vaapas Aaunga is, at its core, an argument for this perspective. It manages to depict the horror of communal violence without making a communal argument. Nevertheless, it does not shy away from clearly underlining the wrong. A predominantly Gen Z audienceThe question is whether there is an audience willing to take that second, more demanding route. The box office collection and the mood in theatres suggest there might be. And, the audience that seems most open to it, perhaps counterintuitively, is the one with no living memory of partition at all. If the theatre I watched the movie in is any indication, young people are giving it a great deal of love. One observation one may make about Gen Z, without generalising, is that it is a generation that has grown up with a fairly sophisticated emotional vocabulary. Concepts from psychology that are often dismissed as therapy-speak – intergenerational trauma, emotional unavailability and suppressed grief showing up as rage – are how they might describe their own families in the ordinary course of a conversation or a bout of “shitposting” – the act of posting low-effort, ironic content to social media. This generation understands, in the abstract, that pain travels across generations.Postmemory and AfsanaThe generation that actually experienced the partition, who could describe sights, sounds and emotions from memory, is fading away. Once they are gone, what remains is postmemory: not the memory itself, but its transmission, filtered, partial and shaped significantly by which of the two routes it took. The problem is that the simplified, angry version transmits instantly. Complex, ambivalent, love-tinged memories are far harder to pass on.Screengrab from the trailer of Main Vaapas Aaunga, Photo: YouTube/Applause Entertainment, Tips Official.In the film, that love-tinged memory has a name: Afsana. The woman Keenu left behind in Sargodha, her name literally meaning fable. Afsana is not presented as a fully realised character in the way Keenu or Nirvair are. She exists primarily as she does in Keenu’s memory, in fragments. This is why the film’s most important scene, for me, is the moment when Pali, Ishar/Keenu’s younger brother and fellow survivor, refuses to narrate his suffering to Nirvair, fearing that his pain will be turned into a weapon. The scene foregrounds the decision of millions of refugees who decided that their children should inherit a new home, not an old wound. The question the film then poses to young people is: what will their generation choose to do with the wound that was passed on to them anyway? Nirvair and his fatherIn Punjabi, the word nirvair means without hatred, without enmity. Nirvair is young enough and far enough removed from the context to have no personal stake in the wound. What makes him interesting is that his distance from the conflict is not indifference. That absence of a predetermined conclusion is what allows him to actually listen when the old man talks. He made me ponder about the rigorous fieldwork Butalia must have done for her book. This quality of attention without agenda is, the film suggests, what allows him to take the second route. He has not been handed a grievance to protect. Screengrab from the trailer of Main Vaapas Aaunga, Photo: YouTube/Applause Entertainment, Tips Official.His father, played by a notably restrained Rajat Kapoor, is the counterpoint. Here is a man one generation closer to the wound, who dealt with it the way most people did, not out of hatred but out of the entirely understandable need to survive and function. The film does not judge him for it. Kapoor’s character reminded me of so many men from my parents’ generation who were displaced from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. A fortuitous connectionLater in the evening, after watching the movie, I returned to YouTube to confirm a serendipitous connection I thought I had made with a video I recently came across. The homage video of O Yaara, a song by Abdul Hannan and Kaavish, tells the story of a young Sikh man from Amritsar who writes a letter in Urdu to a radio station in Pakistan, seemingly a few years after the partition. His Afsana, he knows, is a radio presenter and will read his letter. In the decades after partition, radio waves were among the few things the border could not fully block. Letters to radio stations on both sides were common, one of the ways people maintained a connection, however tenuous, to what they had left behind. The young man in the video – whose name, I wanted to confirm, is Diljit – briefly visits Pakistan, meets her and comes back. That is the whole story.While researching the creators, I found the video’s director, Saad Sheikh, on Instagram. They had, it seems, gone to cheer the MVA team from the other side of the Wagah border at a pre-release promotional event. One of his latest posts summed up the role of art in the contemporary world precisely: “Projects like Main Vaapis Aaunga are literally a beacon of hope in these trying times. When you think the countries, the governments, the culture is not ready for it, that’s exactly the time you make your art.” The audience is making clear what they want. Imtiaz Ali, it seems, has been paying attention. The question is whether others are too. Paromita Ghosh is a Mumbai-based media professional working across linear and streaming platforms.